The two projects were wildly different, one a multipart attempt to give a full scientific explanation that the public could understand, the other a spur-of-the-moment idea that stirred rather than satisfied the scientific appetite.

But both capture the incredible richness of an ordinary thing, a flame.

Dr. Miller, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, specializes in combustion imaging. When he made the video he was setting up a system for teaching schlieren imaging with a high-speed camera while working on his dissertation in Dr. Hanson’s lab.

Schlieren imaging requires a light beam in which the rays are all parallel to each other. Deflected in the right way, the light reveals differences in the density of the gases in the flame.

Dr. Miller usually used a candle to check how well the setup was working, but he decided to try a strike-anywhere match. The results were extraordinary. With the assistance of Dr. Tilghman, then also a graduate student, and Dr. Hanson, he turned a two-second match strike into a small epic.

If the patterns in the flame seem incredibly complex, that’s because they are. The mixing of the gases is an example of turbulence, which the Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman called “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics.”

Excerpts of the two seconds give a glimpse of the potential of this imaging and of the deep complexity of combustion. The full video, and other prize winners, can be found at http://gfm.aps.org.